


Stillness In The Bones

by roseandtiger



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, Post-Canon, Will's mind is playing games with him again, fantasy-or-is-it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-27
Updated: 2016-03-27
Packaged: 2018-05-29 09:39:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6369775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseandtiger/pseuds/roseandtiger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is the man and the wound that pulses and the knife that winks in the dark.<br/>Will's transformation is not complete. Hannibal is Hannibal. He is also frustrated. And maybe he's in trouble. </p>
<p>Who knows?<br/>Will must find out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stillness In The Bones

**Author's Note:**

> I just wanted to write something about these two. I have a general direction of where this is going, but it's not entirely clear to me either. Oop. Sorry. 
> 
> Feel free to correct/critique. I welcome and appreciate it :)

**Stillness In The Bones**

 

There is the man and the wound that pulses and the knife that winks in the dark. There is a body, ripe and swollen like a sack of liquified flesh ready to burst. Heartbeat slow, calculated, blood and breath caccooned in wait. The moon is catalyst. It clothes him in its light and the man dissolves; the knife comes down, brilliant and hot, and the flesh bursts.

The rupture reverberates across the void and the vibrations agitate the waters below. The sea wakes with a roar. Blue eyes open, and the beast sees, and the beast knows itself in being seen. It claws itself out and sheds its old skin, shreds it, assures itself that it can never return to it again. Then it lunges and tears with purpose and precision born of hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary refinement – not to kill, but to connect. It reaches, and in reaching carves a path through dragon's flesh, to grasp at what lies on the other side: the other heartbeat in the dark—the final resting place.  
  


 

 

 

= = =

 

 

 

 

“Do you remember when you kissed Alana Bloom?”

Pain wakes with Will like fire ants scattering and there are flames licking at his face. Hannibal's voice floats to him as if in a dream, encased in cotton. He still knows it, would know it if it whispered to him in the eye of a tornado. When he opens his eyes, the sunlight burns like hot knives and Will struggles to keep them open, instinctively seeking the shadow cast by Hannibal who stands tall and dark against the window, a black shield against the light.

A dark blur, soft and fuzzy around the edges, starts to walk towards him until it is near enough that he can see it as Alana. She's standing by his bed, her head bent close above him, and yet she still seems so far away that it makes his hand twitch. If he were to speak, it would take more than a lifetime for his words to reach her. Perhaps it's always been this way between them: he and Alana, two celestial bodies so far away from each other that any communication between them would take so long to reach one, that the other would, in the meantime, have grown unable to understand it. A primitive form of being, he thinks.

“Your clutch for stability you said. Is that what this was?”

Hannibal has turned to face him now, though Will cannot see his expression against the blinding sun. He is black and faceless and for a flash of a second, mid blink for Will, he has grown horns and roots that reach the center of the earth.

Hannibal doesn't have to name what _this_ is – his murder, Will's suicide. As he is often wont to do, Hannibal asks when he already knows. The true purpose of the question is not the answer, but the knowledge it imparts in being asked. Sometimes Hannibal asks for the pleasure of asking, as if questions were an art. His name from Hannibal's lips is like a finger digging into his wounds. Will, he says, and Will Will Will Will goes the finger, wiggling like a parasitic worm.

“Yes,” Will snaps, teeth rattling with the force of it. He turns his head to avoid Hannibal's gaze. On a faraway wooden stool, there's a tin cup holding a handful of snapdragons. Their stems are long enough that if they were not leaning against the wall, they would overturn the cup. Will puts his head back and remembers reading that snapdragons mean both deception and graciousness. A polite, innocuous snare lying in wait until the moment it is tripped and the teeth wake and clamp down. He thinks Hannibal would like them. He wonders if Hannibal gathered them himself, if and where he found time to bring him flowers. Maybe they came with the house, he thinks, and for a moment his heart skips a beat. Did they belong to someone who was now dead?

When he opens his eyes, Hannibal is still looking at him, studying him. He would bring them to Hannibal's funeral, he thinks, and just like that, like a trigger being pulled, his mind conjures it in an instant. The visions come spilling out, filling his head and Will is given no choice but to dive into their depths.

There is Alana, stark and angular in the morning light, power radiating from every line. She's wearing white, in contrast to the mounds of black that surround her, earth and people at first glance indistinct from each other. None of it touches her. Under her white blazer a splash of rich blood red Hannibal would have approved of. It looks like someone slashed her down the middle and she was frozen in time the instant her blood spilled out. Jack is at the forefront, austere and big as a mountain in the congregation, taller than all. Jack's hat obscures his face and he can't make out his expression. Abigail stands behind him in his shadow, in a dove grey diaphanous dress like she'd just stepped out of a Boticelli. She wears a red ribbon around her neck with fat rubies like arterial blood. The ribbon is long, it flutters in the wind like blood spray. She looks sad – the only one there. There's Bedelia too, golden, radiant Bedelia, with smoke trailing at her feet. She is on fire and the smoke is toxic black and suffocating, and Will wants to tell her to go away because she's giving everyone cancer.  
  
Beneath them, Hannibal in white marble is lowered into the ground like a precious heirloom buried for safekeeping. His likeness is carved atop the lid of a big marble coffin. Will throws his snapdragons of burgundy and purple and they land gently like bruises. He is not satisfied. Hannibal remains untouched and undimmed in the fading light of day. And as he is lowered into the wet earth, the muck that has attached itself to everyone around does not find purchase on him. The marble is a glowing white, hitting Will's eyes like snow in the sun after emerging from darkness. Hannibal is, unlike all watching him from above, wholly clean and sharp, like a hyper realist photograph. Majestic. Look on your works ye mighty and despair, Will thinks in Hannibal's voice and anger bubbles in him like a geyser.  
  
When the first shovelful of dirt is thrown upon Hannibal's white face, Will feels it like coarse sand blown straight into his own face, scraping it raw. Slowly, painfully, Hannibal is being sanded off of him like old paint. It hurts to have all his nerve endings exposed like that to the elements. When it starts to rain, it burns like fire. When Hannibal is almost entirely buried, deeper then any other grave, like a pit, Will looks down to find his vision blurred and is reminded of the time he was seven and his dad had taken him to the local public pool, and his cheap goggles had let water in. This was how it was, looking through tears he had not realized had formed.  
  
It is Hannibal's voice that reels him back from the deep currents until he is once again in his own body, with half of it still on fire. When he opens his eyes a second time to blink the tears away, Hannibal looks human again with his hand pressed against his belly, seated on a chair far below his standards.

The incongruity between the two causes something to crack, a hairline fissure that Will hears like glaciers breaking. He takes in Hannibal's face which bears the marks put there by Will. Cuts and bruises have not yet faded from it. Lower down, his chest is a mottle of blues, purples and dark reds and Will is reminded again of the snapdragons. Below that, on his right side, the white bandages concealing where the dragon pierced him. And quickly, far too quickly, like a fire starved of oxygen, anger burns out of him, extinguished by the pain he sees reflected back at him in the form of Hannibal sitting with great difficulty, hunched over as if under a great weight. Will hates himself for feeling at all.  
  
“Where did you go?” Hannibal asks.  
  
“Your funeral,” Will answers without hesitation.

Hannibal stirs at that, but his eyes do not turn to Will. “How was it?” he asks in a low, dry whisper and an ease that Will doesn't buy. As if this were any other of their countless past conversations. Another night warmed by fire and wine, discussing life and death and myth.

It takes Will some time to find the right word. “Unsatisfactory,” he says in the end and this earns a smile from Hannibal, a mere light stretch of the lips that is barely visible, but his eyes when he lifts them are bright like wet marbles.

“Why?”

The word is short and weightless on Hannibal's mouth, but it grows hot and heavy in the space between them. Hannibal's questions are often like that. They suck the moisture from the room, growing like a locust cloud into a legion of questions. Will honestly doesn't think he has the strength to walk through it. Thinking about a confrontation with Hannibal saps him of wakefulness like a fever. The thought alone, buzzing about his brain like a mosquito, drains him and leaves him limp and dry like a corn husk. His eyes droop. He wants to hide. It is shameful, but it is the truth. So he does.  
  


He closes his eyes and puts his head back.

 

 

 

= = =

 

 

 

The sun rises again. The curtains of the room are white and, facing east, do not provide much shelter from the light. _Please hide me Lord,_ he hears in a voice not his own, low and grainy, shaking the walls of his mind. D _on't you see me prayin'?_

When he was a boy, maybe ten or eleven, Will would sometimes be struck by the fear that others could read his thoughts. It would creep upon him, the fear, while sitting on a bus or doing his homework in the library, or watching his father cast a line, or dip his blackened hands into the entrails of diesel engines. Will's thoughts often strayed to unfinished conversations he would relive and reshape in his head, multiple scenarios of his imaginings. Sometimes while he walked, while gazing out the windows of school buses, while running, while showering, but no matter the time, he remembered the fear that someone would see him as he was, completely exposed. The blood would rush to his face, warming it, making his ears burn, inside and out, as he watched the faces of strangers for clues. Did they hear? Did they see? Did they know he knew they knew? Did they listen to his panic as his thoughts spilled out like vomit onto their shoes? 

And later in life when he was grown, the fear did not leave him. It did not come wearing the faces of strangers anymore, but it now bore his own. Another Will Graham out there in the world, listening, watching, able to swing the pendulum in his direction. Any moment he could bump into himself and on those days, no matter how warm it was outside, he would always be left shivering.

Now, lying in bed with the sun thawing him through the window, Will remembers those times, though he's not precisely sure why he's remembering. Going looking for lost things in the unconscious is like dredging a river—all kinds of things come out of the murk. And Hannibal is like an oil spill.

What was the last thought he dragged down with him into the depths of sleep? He can't recall. The stag, he thinks. It was the stag, clicking its hooves on the hardwood floor, click click like a woman's stilettos. He feels just as drained as the day before. Maybe the stag is a blood sucking succubus – it's really a toss up when it comes to anything to do with Hannibal. He ought to abandon reason altogether, he thinks. Maybe then he would not be haunted by madness and this sense of loss that feels like insatiable hunger. Food revolts him. He will sit here and waste away. It will be his choice at least. 

There is an uncountable amount of anger in him, a great blazing fury for the universe and all its players – for God. He feels it like a burner in his chest, heating his insides, causing them to balloon and he fears he will explode soon under the pressure. He can't find it in him to regret the anger. He can't find it in him to cool it. How long could a man lay himself down and let his skin, his whole being, stretch out like a canvas? The one time he took brush in hand he ended up here. His design utterly rejected by fate.

  
Hannibal is cooking downstairs, Will can hear him. He could walk down, eat, share a meal with him. Or he could scour the room for a makeshift weapon. Hannibal is still weak, Will could take him. Maybe. Will has healed faster, this he knows. He thinks Hannibal has tended to him more than his own wounds, but maybe Will's were just that much more severe, necessitating the fussing over.

But a bullet to the gut is nothing to scoff at. Will has seen Hannibal hunching, instinct pulling him protectively to his right. He's seen the sway, Hannibal's slight touches against the wall to steady himself. Not noticeable to anyone else, he thinks, and another might have missed them entirely. Another _would_ miss them entirely.

For a moment, a dizzying sensation overtakes him, as if his blood has rushed to his head all at once, sloshed around and then been flung to his extremities. In the hullabaloo, a thought falls out ringing like a bell – that he, Will Graham, might be the only one left able to read the language of Hannibal Lecter. The last of his kind. He feels hot breath behind him (his own blood rushing) and hears hooves against the hardwood.

What would the world be like without Hannibal?

His mind cannot help it, like a flower curling inwards when touched – it pulls at the suggestion, envelops him into the visions it builds. How many times has he put himself in that moment? The moment where he is looking down on Hannibal, with hands torn and bleeding, raining down the deluge of wrath he can hardly contain. How many times has he failed when put there? The path is well worn and ends at a cliff with no way out. Again and again Hannibal's head has been placed on a silver platter, garnished with all the help he could ask for, and where has it got him? He knows, like he knows up from down, that he lives and with him Hannibal breathes too. Without him, Will does not.

There is a blood red thread connecting him to Hannibal. Will can see it stretching and sprouting new roots, shooting out in all directions. Lines growing into branches, a whole tree of capillaries, veins, arteries, a conjoined circulatory system pulsating between them, vibrating in tune with the phantom heart of a single organism.

A knock at his door – barely a door, more formality than function, mere politeness. The bottom third of it is rotting away. One day, it will disintegrate at a touch from Hannibal, a turn of its handle, and collapse into dust. And one day Will will join it if he hasn't already. Hannibal's presence reels him back as if Will were a fish caught and thrown into the ocean again and again for amusement. How does it feel, he asks himself in his own voice. To be the fish, with mouth torn open and bleeding?

Hannibal is carrying a tray, a wooden board loaded with food. A seaweed omelet Will could smell from downstairs and a glass of water. Bread and pills. A sea urchin, still moving, because even in the face of death and oblivion some things, like Hannibal's flair for the theatrical, remain one of the great constants of the universe. There's even a nautilus shell, its iridescent sheen drawing Will's eyes more than anything else. He manages to hold in a hysterical laugh threatening to burst out.  
  
“Thank you” he says, sitting up to accept Hannibal's offer.

Hannibal inclines his head. “We will have to move. This is the last of our provisions. The uni was improvised.”  
  
Dizziness returns all at once, Will's mouth dries up and his fingers begin to tremble. The food looks as appetizing as grass. The thought of returning to the world is not something he wants in his head. He hasn't thought about the future. He's actively avoided thinking altogether. Eat, sleep, exchange two or three words with Hannibal. Repeat. For days he has done this and now he feels woefully unprepared.  
  
“So soon?” he asks, deliberately sullen and maybe a little petulant. He knows he's poking a particularly unpredictable predator, but he can't help the jab. _Didn't you foresee this?_ is what he is really saying. Hannibal straightens on cue like Will just activated his pull cord.  
  
“My apologies, Will. I must admit I had not anticipated anything quite so operatic from you." 

He can feel Hannibal's anger in his molars same as biting into a vibrating phone. _Liar_ , he thinks, and spears his food in anger. Too hard, the fork scrapes against the plate and he shivers.

“Did you really never consider that happening?”

“I imagined our end and our beginning in a myriad ways, Will. But hope remains the cruelest gift God gave mankind.”

Will wants to scream. He wants to say, _I am Will Graham, it's what Will Graham would do_. How could Hannibal not know that? He should have known Will could never withstand the crushing pressure of a descent that deep. Hannibal is no Hades. Hannibal would accept no compromise. He would accept nothing short of permanence. Hannibal's eyes bear down on him with the weight of the world. Chestnut, umber, gold in the morning light, and in there, flickering in and out of that sea of molten things, glints of red peak out like fish scales glazed by the setting sun. There goes the beast, Will thinks.

“You want to know why I did it, or do you already know why I did it?” He bites down hard after the words are out, grinds his teeth to dust, wants to blow it across Hannibal's face. _See?_ This is what I never wanted for us, he wants to say. It takes all his strength to suck in the flames he wants to breathe out.

“I don't know what you want me to say” Will says in the end and Hannibal in his wisdom retreats. In the heartbeats that follow his departure, it is Will who deflates like an unwanted balloon, which allows clarity to push in and take its place among the debris in his mind. 

Hannibal is no doubt furious. At himself, at Will, maybe both and everyone. What does he want that he does not already have? Here they are, both survivors of their wrath, and where does that leave them? Where does it lead them? See, Hannibal? He wants to scream and shake him until the words embed themselves in Hannibal like shrapnel. _See?_

The next day, Hannibal moves them. He helps Will to a blue Jeep and Will knows they are bound for somewhere remote again, which isn't what he thought Hannibal would do. After almost two weeks, give or take a few days, he expected flight, a quick severing of themselves from the land. Perhaps another continent.  
  
“Another house?”  
  
“Yes,” Hannibal says without elaborating further.

There is coffee in the cup holder inside the car and Will cannot resist its aroma. He gulps down a third of it, something Hannibal no doubt thinks an affront to taste and decency, but Will can't bring himself to care. He's not here to savour.

“What about this place?” he asks when Hannibal starts the car and the old house by the water is growing further and further away in the rear view mirror. He feels no attachment to it and this at least is not a loss.  
  
“We were never there.” Hannibal says with a faint smile.  
  
Chiyoh then, who else? He says as much, but there is no response. Hannibal's unwillingness to give any further details as if Will were no more than luggage makes him uneasy and stirs the embers of anger in his belly again. He turns from Hannibal and rests his head against the window, where the cold seeps into his skin to cool him. He may have a fever, he thinks, and welcomes sleep as a reprieve from present company.

 

 

 

= = =

 

 

 

The other property is a cabin in the woods quite a long distance from traditional roads. Will has no more specifics than that because he slept the whole way through, right up until Hannibal shook him awake a few hours' walk from their destination.

Will had been simultaneously drowning in his sweat and shivering from the cold, but he had kept going and had neither asked nor received any assistance. Bent forward, he had trudged on, one foot in front of the other, grunting softly through the ascent. Hannibal had followed, and once or twice Will had felt a hand at his back, steadying him, or perhaps testing the muscle to see how long Will could keep going. It had been a three hour walk according to Hannibal, even after they had pushed the Jeep as far as it would go. Will wondered what they would do with it, then supposed Chiyoh was likely tailing them and would drive it back as far away from them as she could before losing it somewhere.

The cabin is small; Hannibal has probably had bigger closets. It is furnished, but years and disuse have weathered it and it looks older than it is, inside and out. It is a typical cabin and nothing of it suggests Hannibal in the slightest. It will do.

Hannibal unfolds a sofa bed and Will drops himself on it, unmindful of the dust and debris of entropy that rise around him in a cloud.

He does not notice the light bleed out or the darkness crawl back into the world. Out, beyond the porch, waves of trees stretch out, their tops like arrows thrust upward at the sky. When he wakes in the middle of the night to piss, he walks out, barefoot, and stands under the millions of stars until his back begins to ache. He finds himself grateful for the mountains and woods and earth beneath his feet. He remembers the saltwater and the shifting sand and he shudders.

When he goes back, feverish and in pain, he dreams that a great wave crests up above the treetops. He wakes before it breaks, with the wall of water advancing upon him like a moving mountain. For all his love of water, the memory of it makes his throat close up.

A distant howl marks how far away from water he is. A second howl answers the first, stretching out longer before dying down in whimpers. Wolf cries have always sounded mournful to him, as if the animals knew no other way to communicate but wailing and crying out, spilling pain like it is all they have ever known and all they recognize.  
  
He can make out Hannibal sleeping across from him, under a silver blue veil thrown on him by the moon, which has found him through the window like a spotlight. Outside, the wolves' cries rise and fall together in unison. They sound eerie and alien like whale songs in the dark.

When morning comes he is alone and the sky is a featureless grey, a vast emptiness hanging above, heavy like wet blankets ready to plop down and smother him. He breathes in deeply and tastes metal in the back of his throat. Something in the water, he thinks, in the wetness of the air. Something insidious. The forest before him stretches in all directions and _he is alone_.

He turns his back to it in defiance and heads back inside. He will wait. The cabin is well stocked. 

In the night, the wolves come out crying again. Is he lost, or is Hannibal?

On the third day, his hands start to twitch. He makes coffee, but that only makes it worse. Hannibal has left and has not returned. Either because they are further from civilization than Will initially thought, or because he is trying to make a point, Will is now alone.

He tests the word in his mind, turning it this way and that. He does not truly believe it. Hannibal would not leave. He would not wake up one day and release Will from bondage any more than Will would do the same. 

Outside the window, the mountains have faded into whiteness and a heavy fog is rolling in.


End file.
